Masters of Horrors Unite

Anyone who has been reading this site for any length of time probably knows that I am a huge ass fan of horror movies. Hence why I've been so damn hard on the crap that this genre has been infested with over the past couple of years. So, when I heard Showtime was producing this series, "Masters of Horrors," about six months ago or so, I have been literally counting the days. And Friday night, the first installment was leashed on to the public.

For those that don't know what the hell I'm talking about. "Masters of Horror" is an anthology series thought up by Mick Garris, who is best known for his Stephen King adaptations like "The Stand" and "Sleepwalkers." His vision was to get some of the best horror directors, young and old, out there and have them each do a one hour self contained horror film. He got twelve directors and himself on board for this first go round, and Showtime has been nice enough to show it before it's inevitable Anchor Bay DVD release date. So, even if you don't get Showtime these will be available to you probably by the Spring.

So, for the next thirteen weeks all horror fans will hopefully be happy they finally have some genre product out there that's actually worth watching. I can't imagine that every one of these is going to be a winner, but even if only half of them are kick ass, that works out pretty well for me.

So, here's my two cents on the first installment of "Masters of Horror," and it is called:

INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD

dir. Don Coscarelli
written by. Don Coscarelli and Stephen Romano

Coscarelli is the mastermind behind the cult classic "Phantasm" films, which if you haven't seen I highly reccomend you get a bunch of friends together, your drug of choice, and sit yourself down and engorge yourself with these four bizarre as hell acid trips of a horror film series. More recently Coscarelli is famous, or infamous depending on your tastes, for "Bubba Ho-Tep." Ho-Tep starred Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley in present day fighting off a mummy at a nursing home. If you haven't seen this, either have another night of drug induced film watching, or add it on to the same night with the "Phantasm" films. Ho-Tep was based on a short story by Joe R. Landsdale (possibly the most underrated writer of all time; read "Mucho Mojo" and tell me I'm wrong), and "Incident" is Coscarelli's second adaptation of one of Landsdale's short stories.

Now, based on my former Coscarelli viewings, I expected "Incident" to be a strange, trippy, comedy-horror kind of thing. What surprised me was this was straight up horror, and what suprised me even more was how good Coscarelli was at handling horror lacking the comic relief. It makes me wish some major studio would latch onto this guy and let him make some horror movies, instead of these music video veterans and their versions of "House of Wax" and "The Amityville Horror."

The story starts off with a woman (Bree Turner) driving down a dark deserted highway when she has to slam on the brakes to avoid a car parked in the middle of the road. She, in typical horror movie fashion, nails the car and is stuck out in the middle of nowhere. As soon as she gets out of her car she sees who she thinks is the driver on the other side of the guard rail, and when she goes over to make sure he's alright, he turns out to be some kind of monster setting a trap and wanting to kill her.

Sounds pretty generic and all, but then the tables turn, and turn quickly. This is not your typical defenseless female victim; essentially, the monster has picked the wrong woman to fuck with in more ways than one.

The episode throughout flashes back to scenes of our heroine and her doomed from the start marriage to a psycho, survivalist nut played very well by Ethan Embry. You remember the dorky kid from "Can't Hardly Wait," well, this a nice, welcomed 180 for him. This is the kind of guy who thinks the city is full of ingrates and psychos, so he moves her to a cabin in the woods where he walks the perimeter every night with an automatic weapon. As we flash back to the present, we learn our heroine picked up quite a few tricks from her wacko husband and quickly turns the tables on her pursuer.

This all leads to the monster's lair which is filled with dead bodies on crosses with their eyes cut out, and one victim still alive for whatever reason. He is played by veteran horror actor Angus Scrimm, who Chris and KW will know from his turn on "Alias" in the first couple of seasons as SD-6's torturer. He also played the infamous Tall Man in the "Phantasm" series.

And like most anthology series, "Twilight Zone" and "Tales From the Crypt" for example, the installment ends with a twist. And it's a good one that actually works, unlike some recent twist endings, like say "Saw II." The reason it works so well is because this story acutally has good build-up to it, and everything falls into place once you see it.

This is not perfect by any means; the hour long running time is somewhat of a hinderance. This actually could have used twenty or thirty more minutes to flesh it out a little more. I think there were some really cool avenues the story could have taken with a feature length running time. Angus Scrimm's character also seemed a little contrived. I guess he's supposed to be set up as some kind of red herring, but in the end his character could have been taken out of the story, and it wouldn't have hindered it in anyway.

But these are small problems that the good moments make you overlook. This is simply the best piece of horror filmmaking I've seen this year. And the fact that we've got twelve more of these coming from the likes of John Carpenter, John Landis, Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, etc. just makes me happy to be a horror movie fan again.